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Ahh the old PowerBook 100s. Nice little laptops if hindered a little by the 16MHz 68000 processor.

You should be able to boot this with a System 7.0.1 startup floppy disk if my memory serves me correctly. I had a PowerBook 140 which was released at the same time as the 100 (1991)—although the PowerBook 100 was designed by Sony for Apple...

Just make doubly sure the battery is OK as those are lead acid batteries if my memory is also working right!

Otherwise, what a cracking find! A lovely machine definitely to keep in your collection.

Graphite is right, System 7.01 is freely available from Apple and so is System 7.5.3.

All you need is a system that can write the floppy disks. I'm sure all disks except the cranky old System 6 ones are 1.4MB disk images which I am certain you can write on a PC. The 800K images cannot be written on a PC as the Double Density format Macs used was very weird (spun at different speeds depending on sector...)

The Apple Macintosh PowerBook 100, codesigned by Apple and Sony, features a 16 MHz 68HC000 processor, 4 MB of RAM, and either a 20 MB, 40 MB, or 80 MB hard drive in a compact portable case with a 9.0" monochrome passive-matrix display and an external disk drive (not pictured). Basically, the PowerBook 100 is a redesigned version of the Backlit Portable in a smaller case that only weighs five pounds, a full ten pounds lighter than its predecessor.

My pizza-box LC, which came out in 1990, could read the lower-density floppy disks as well as the high-densities, so if you can get a new system only on lower densities, it should be able to read them. According to everymac.com, your machine came out a year later than my LC.

It's possible, but it isn't easy. If your Quadra has PC Exchange (I'm think that came with System 7.1), it can mount 720 KB and 1.44 MB PC floppies. Beyond that, things get unpredictable. . . .

I would suggest upgrading to System 7.5.3, which is free from Apple. It's a more polished, more feature laden version of the Mac OS that runs about as efficiently as 7.1 does.

As lil said, I'm almost positive they were 800 K floppies, not 720.

Hmm, anyone have a version of TechTool that would fit on a floppy and run in System 6.0-7.5 (not sure what os is installed but know it falls between those)

If you get it running, don't be reluctant to use Norton Disk Doctor if the opportunity to acquire an old version presents itself. Norton had a system disk with Disk Doctor on it. Though little less than a virus with System X, Norton Disk Doctor and Speed Disk were superb with the old systems. I still use it for System 9. But do not load Norton File Saver. That program caused problems and was the beginning of Norton's slide.